Mapping the Mind

In order to decide about this matter of either pursuing individual improvement or simply sharing in collective progress a person needs a map. With a map and, if possible, a time-table, an individual could assess the relative merits of plodding along with the herd, or striking out alone. The easiest way to draw this map is by first fixing the current location on the Spectrum of the greater bulk of humanity. Then, with the location of contemporary culture firmly fixed, the surrounding landmarks can be filled in by working backwards and forwards along the route of the Spectrum.

The dimension of consciousness that humans generally agree sets their species apart from other animals is usually referred to as ‘self consciousness’. It was the attainment of self consciousness that thrust the human race onto the third plane of evolution, the psycho-social phase. So, in the broadest of terms, the mass of humanity is currently residing at a point on the Spectrum that can be labelled ‘self identity’. In the same broad terms the level below self identity can be temporarily called ‘pre-self identity’, and the level above it ‘post-self identity’. So far the Spectrum looks like Figure 3.

Figure 3 Self Identity

Self identity separates individual humans from their surrounding environment and causes them to focus on themselves as life-forms that exist independently of, and apart from, the myriad life-forms in the social and ecological systems that surround them. Although it is possible to speculate that the whole of the natural world might be eternal it is impossible to escape the fact that detached entities, such as individual humans, are temporal. So the corollary to the consciousness of a self-existence is the knowledge that this separate individual existence is impermanent. And herein lies the rub.

What possible reason can there be for our separate, individual lives? And why must we endure this special consciousness of ourselves as separate beings? Why are we denied the comfort that our Biblical ancestor Adam supposedly enjoyed, before he disgraced himself, of blending our identities with the surrounding environment? Why couldn't we have remained at-one with the Garden of Eden? Why does it feel like self-delusion when we try to give our lives meaning with the belief that we are small parts of an eternal whole?

The answer is simply that human consciousness has evolved beyond a sense of comfortable at-one-ment like this. The price of evolution is more complexity of consciousness. And the price of more complexity is often discomfiture of mind. This discomfiture is built into the evolutionary process. Discomfiture, derived from an existing level of consciousness, causes people to seek a solution through gaining higher consciousness.

This quest to ameliorate existing discomfort can be illustrated by successive stages in the development of Self identity. What propels people through these stages of Self identity is the constant need to acquire more consciousness in order to deal with the anxiety generated by the consciousness they already have.

The first stage of Self identity is the knowledge of personal mortality. This level can be called ‘survival of self’. Most people develop Survival of Self in adolescence.

In order to live with the knowledge of personal mortality each successive generation has to learn a vital piece of knowledge. This is the knowledge of procreation — that by finding a mate, and producing off-spring, the problem of personal extinction can be partly solved. Children are half-replicas of each of their two parents. If a child is left behind after death a part of each parent, in a sense, lives on. This part can be multiplied by the number of children. The children in turn have their children and so a chain of immortal existence can be envisaged extending into the future. It's true that the parental residue is halved with each succeeding generation but hopefully this can be compensated for by an increase in the number of descendants with each generation.

In the minds of self conscious humans the purposefulness associated with reproductive potential tends to balance the sense of futility accompanying the knowledge of personal mortality. Many possibilities are available for living purposefully if life can be centred around the establishment of a family. Here the fundamental task of life is to use one's fertility as a tool of creativity and to make as many replicas of oneself as is practical.

But the success of fertility identity, as a compensator for the anxieties of survival identity, requires that the individual concerned knows positively that the children that are identified as off-spring are not in fact somebody else's children. If there is any doubt in this regard the person is back at square one. In fact, to have doubts over parentage is in many ways a lot worse than having no fertility identity at all. A person who is suffering from doubt over the bona fides of offspring not only has to face the certainty of death but is also confronted with the possibility that the energy being consumed trying to deal with the problem might only be benefiting a rival.

This means that the biological division of the human species into male and female offers a distinct advantage to women when it comes to the expression of fertility identity. A woman always knows when she has successfully reproduced herself because she actually gives birth to the child. A man, on the other hand, at best only knows that a woman has told him he is the father of a particular child. More often than not he won't be even told but will simply be left to make the assumption.

And on what does he base this assumption? That he cohabits with a woman who has given birth; that he doesn't think she has had any opportunity or inclination to take another lover; that the child looks like him. Who is he kidding? He doesn't really know and he'll never know. So he decides he needs to take some steps to increase his fertility security.

The most obvious strategy for a man with fertility insecurity is to try to isolate a woman so that he has exclusive sexual rights to her. Most men find it is impractical to achieve this by locking a woman up in a tower or retreating to a lonely location. The most common method of sexually quarantining a woman is through the cultural device of a binding marriage contract. Traditionally, marriage contracts provide severe penalties for any breach of a strictly monogamous sexual arrangement.

Monogamous marriage alone, however, doesn't provide the kind of certainty that insecure fertility identities normally require. A more important strategy involves a further evolution of the consciousness of self beyond fertility identity. To have any real measure of inner peace self conscious men need to see themselves as being both attractive and powerful. Dominance is seen as the key to both controlling a wife and fending off male rivals. The will to dominance springs from a further expression of self identity which is one step up the Spectrum from fertility. This higher level of the self is called ‘status identity’.

If fertility identity is an advancement beyond survival identity that particularly favours women, status identity is a further advancement beyond fertility identity that is particularly favoured by men. However, any casual reflection on the nature of human behaviour makes it evident that the will to status is not an exclusive male province. It just seems that way sometimes because of the male obsession with status. Men, generally, have a more urgent need than women to advance beyond fertility identity. But the dominance of women by men, in order to compensate men for their fertility inadequacy, is only one of many possible uses of status identity. Status identity is also commonly used by men to dominate other men and by women to dominate both men and other women.

Since humans tend to live in groups the widespread expression of status identity has led to social arrangements based on hierarchical structures. This means ordering individuals, within collective frameworks, from highest to lowest, best to least. Status identity has become the principle of social organisation and the favoured method of achieving group discipline. It allows a mass of separate individuals to be welded into a collective identity. Individuals with the most status become leaders and decision-makers for the majority.

Unfortunately, status identity, like fertility and survival before it, doesn't offer the final solution to life. In practice it only generates a whole new set of anxieties, particularly for those who fail to win a position of elevation on the status hierarchy. What, after all, is the definitive way of measuring the relative merits of all the aspirants for status? If you put together in a room the strongest man in the world, the most beautiful woman and the richest person and tell them to arrange themselves into a hierarchy of merit, which personal attribute will be the most powerful? Will the strong man bully the other two into submission; will the beautiful woman dominate the other two by making them feel ugly and vulgar; or will the rich person buy compliance by turning the other two into employees? In status expression there are always winners and losers. The losers aren't necessarily inferior beings by any absolute standard but are only inferior according to the established status rules at a given place and time.

When a man fails to win sufficient status it has a direct impact on his sense of fertility security which, in turn, impacts on his survival security. How does a low status male defend his exclusive sexual rights, granted to him by a marriage contract, from the predatory threats of higher status males? As a consequence of the stress and anxiety of such concerns the low status male's sense of fulfilment and purpose in life is undermined. Wife bashing frequently results from a desperate attempt to feel sufficiently dominant.

Most low status men, however, successfully avoid becoming too degenerate by continually striving for status throughout their lives and keeping alive the hope and expectation that their position on the hierarchy is about to improve. To facilitate this life-long quest for status our modern society has devised a status hierarchy based on the acquisition of wealth which offers everybody maximum opportunity to gain access to improvement. However, although the fluidity of this money-based hierarchy offers succour to the losers, by constantly promising a change in fortune through opportunities like gambling, it tends to maximise the insecurity of the winners by keeping many of them in a state of constant anxiety over fluctuations in the national economy.

The contemporary status game is somewhat paradoxical for women. Having more fertility security than men they have less reason to enter fully into status identity. However, once embarked on the development of a status identity they have exactly the same potential as men. The paradox is that the more status a woman acquires the more she tends to restrict the range of her choice of fertility partners. This is the opposite of the male experience. It is largely because a woman's choice amongst men is generally restricted to those men with higher status. This is most frequently because of men’s needs rather than women’s snobbery and arises from male fertility insecurity. Monogamous relationships offer little succour for male fertility fears unless the man is dominant. A male dominated relationship usually isn't possible when the female partner has a higher position on the social status hierarchy.

Nevertheless, women in contemporary market societies are generally no longer satisfied to languish in fertility identities and suffer from the total dependence on, and dominance by, men. Women have fairly easy access to status identity through education and entry into the work-force. Once there, however, they must either endure comparatively low status by remaining near the bottom of the hierarchy or otherwise risk destabilising their husband's fertility security by being competitive and climbing the hierarchy.

But it's hardly better for men. The losers on the lower end of the scale live frustrated lives hoping forlornly that one day they will improve their situation. Meanwhile, high status males live under the constant threat of losing their acquired status through financial reversal. Confusion, insecurity and a record divorce rate prevails.

Sensitive people find life stressful under these conditions. When stress reaches a certain point of intensity the sufferer usually has one simple requirement — peace and quiet. Peace and quiet might not be difficult to find but there is a problem to solve before it can be properly enjoyed. How does one enjoy peace and quiet without slipping back down the Spectrum through fertility identity and into the abyss of survival identity? How does one live in peace and quiet and still have a sense of purpose in life?

The answer lies in the potential for further evolutionary advancement up the Spectrum of psychic energy. This advancement is available to any person who realises that the stress arising from collective expression of self identity is only in the mind, and that the frustrated desires and exposed fears arising from the various levels of self identity can be transcended by making mental readjustments.

Many people, of course, reassess themselves and adjust their attitudes at various times during their lives. For the most part this periodic tinkering concerns the need to realign elements of self identity within the shifting patterns of the collective mind. People who undergo this type of readjustment are usually just seeking to express their self identities more effectively. This is the case when people change their career paths, or seek advice from professional counsellors.

But a readjustment involving a solitary movement up the Spectrum is something of an altogether different proportion. Rather than involving a re-arrangement of self identity it is an evolutionary migration out of, and beyond, the stress of self identity altogether. A person who makes this transition discovers that the problems of alienation that arise with the consciousness of self can only be solved within the mind of the perceiver. These problems can't be solved by the self expressing itself externally in the physical world. The problems of status, for instance, can't be solved by acquiring more status. A person who undergoes such a realisation enters the realm of meditation and learns that the purpose of life — rather than being the survival, reproduction and status of the existing self — is actually to leave the self behind and evolve into higher consciousness.

In relating all this back to the project of mapping the Spectrum the post-self identity of the first map can now be more accurately labelled as mind identity. It is also possible to fill in some of the details of self identity on the map (see Figure 4).

Figure 4 Mind Identity

The pattern that is emerging on the map is one which has a number of over-themes that can be sub-divided into gradations of expression. Self identity, for instance, can be sub-divided into the three ‘tones’ of Survival, Fertility and Status. It will be established a little further on that the same three gradations of expression apply to all the over-themes and that Survival, Fertility and Status are repeated all the way along the Spectrum. But, firstly, a brief discussion on pre-Self identity is necessary. Some knowledge about this distant ancestral identity is required because, to a certain degree, the collective minds of modern people are still influenced by it.

There is some difficulty in getting a clear view of this lower level on the Spectrum since it is an expression of human identity that has been largely confined to a pre-literate phase of history. But there are a couple of approaches which provide glimpses. One is to find traces of it by analysing world mythology. Another is to look at the cultural identities of people within the historical era who have resisted induction into modern social structures.

It is also possible to get a grasp on pre-Self identity intuitively. If Self consciousness separates individuals from their surrounding environment, by informing them they are destined to die alone while the world goes on without them, then it is fair to assume that pre-Self identity would most likely give people a sense of unity with their surrounding environment. This is indeed the mystical interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Before the ‘fall’ the first humans are portrayed as being at-one with their surroundings, and at peace with their creator. This happy state was only interrupted when the serpent tempted them with the knowledge of self identity. (Both snakes and ladders have been traditionally used as metaphors to illustrate the Spectrum of psychic energy).

The oldest type of cultural organisation still existing in the modern world is a pattern generally referred to as hunter/gatherer. There are only a few isolated fragments of this cultural type left and all of these are rapidly disappearing. Hunter/gatherer cultures provide for strong tribal identification with the land in general but they also promote a special personal bonding within each individual with a particular place. These special places inspire a sense of awe and belonging in the individuals concerned, appearing to have eternal lives that offer their own kind of status, fertility and survival amongst the community of places. These special places can be called territories and the level of consciousness that causes an individual to relate to life in this way can be called ‘territory identity’.

Figure 5 The Full Spectrum

In the updated map of the spectrum (see figure 5), Survival, Fertility and Status repeat, as what can be called Themes, all the way along the Spectrum. Meanwhile, Territory, Self, Mind and Cosmos emerge as Over-Themes which contain the three repeating Themes as gradations of expression. An individual whose identity draws energy from immediately below Self identity would be in a mode that can be referred to as Status of Territory identity. Similarly, a person who evolves out of Self identity into the higher expression of Mind identity will first enter into Survival of Mind identity.

Identification with the Cosmos is located high on the Spectrum, above Mind. A common goal of mystical practice is the attainment of cosmic consciousness, or union with God. Being at-one with God is a perennial human yearning. However, a traveller who sets off for this destination must first navigate a passage through the labyrinth of Mind consciousness. The pathway to cosmic knowledge is through inner space, not outer space. The new frontier is in the mind.